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Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

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Re: Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

#71

Post by wtallis »

sarchertech wrote: post #34
fishtoaster wrote: post #17

Figuring out how to trust AI-written code faster is the project of software engineering for the next few years, IMO. We'll need to figure out the techniques and strategies that let us merge AI code sight unseen. Some ideas that have already started floating around: - Include the spec for the change in your PR and only bother reviewing that , on the assumption that the AI faithfully executed it - Lean harder on your d…

Translating from a natural language spec to code involves a truly massive amount of decision making. For a non trivial program, 2 implementations of the same natural language spec will have thousands of observable differences. Where we are today, that is agents require guardrails to keep from spinning out, there is no way to let agents work on code autonomously that won’t end up with all of those observable differenc…

> Tests can’t prevent this because for a test suite to cover all observable behavior, it would need to be more complex than the code. In which case, it wouldn’t be any easier for machine or human to understand.

I don't think "complex" is the right word here. A test suite would generally be more verbose than the implementation, but a lot of the time it can simply be a long list of input->output pairs that are individually very comprehensible and easily reviewable to a human. The hard part is usually discovering what isn't covered by the test case, rather than validating the correctness of the test cases you do have.

Re: Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

#72

Post by wizzwizz4 »

wtallis wrote: post #71
sarchertech wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translating from a natural language spec to code involves a truly massive amount of decision making. For a non trivial program, 2 implementations of the same natural language spec will have thousands of observable differences. Where we are today, that is agents require guardrails to keep from spinning out, there is no way to let agents work on code autonomously that won’t end up with all of those observable differenc…

> Tests can’t prevent this because for a test suite to cover all observable behavior, it would need to be more complex than the code. In which case, it wouldn’t be any easier for machine or human to understand. I don't think "complex" is the right word here. A test suite would generally be more verbose than the implementation, but a lot of the time it can simply be a long list of input->output pairs that are individu…

If some of those input-output pairs are the result of a different interpretation of the spec to other input-output pairs, it's possible that no program satisfies all the tests (or, worse, that a program that satisfies all the tests isn't correct).

Re: Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

#73

Post by px1999 »

fishtoaster wrote: post #17

Figuring out how to trust AI-written code faster is the project of software engineering for the next few years, IMO. We'll need to figure out the techniques and strategies that let us merge AI code sight unseen. Some ideas that have already started floating around: - Include the spec for the change in your PR and only bother reviewing that , on the assumption that the AI faithfully executed it - Lean harder on your d…

Very well said.

I think that "deciding what types of code can be reliably handed off to AI" might be missing from the list. It's orders of magnitude easier to nail 80% all the time than 100% all the time. I could see standalone products even developing in this space.

Re: Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

#74

Post by NewsaHackO »

ahsisjb wrote: post #41
fishtoaster wrote: post #17

Figuring out how to trust AI-written code faster is the project of software engineering for the next few years, IMO. We'll need to figure out the techniques and strategies that let us merge AI code sight unseen. Some ideas that have already started floating around: - Include the spec for the change in your PR and only bother reviewing that , on the assumption that the AI faithfully executed it - Lean harder on your d…

> Figuring out how to trust AI-written code faster is the project of software engineering for the next few years, IMO Replace AI written with “cheap dev written” and think about why that isn’t already true. The bottleneck is a competent dev understanding a project. Always has been. Another fundamental flaw is you can’t trust LLMs. It’s fundamentally impossible compared to the way you trust a human. Humans make mistak…

>Humans make mistakes. LLMs do not. Anything “wrong” they do is them working exactly as designed.

This requires a redefinition of the term mistake, no?

Re: Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

#75

Post by NewsaHackO »

talkvoix wrote: post #68

With a CS degree and 15 years of software engineering under my belt, I was initially skeptical of 'vibe coding'. But the article is right about this adolescent phase. I recently built my platform ( https://voix.chat ) 100% through agentic workflows. Having that much experience meant I didn't use the AI as a crutch to learn how to code; I used it as a hyper-productive junior dev while I played the paranoid senior arch…

Your FAQ page is in Portuguese, even though my language is set to English. Changing the language does not seem to change the FAQ. Did you forget to localize this?

Re: Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

#76

Post by axi0m »

apical_dendrite wrote: post #7

My company recently hired a contractor. He submits multi-thousand line PRs every day, far faster than I can review them. This would maybe be OK if I could trust his output, but I can't. When I ask him really basic questions about the system, he either doesn't know or he gets it wrong. This week, I asked for some simple scripts that would let someone load data in a a local or staging environment, so that the system co…

I'm observing pretty much the same pattern in my job. The sad truth is, people -especially non-technical- get too easily impressed by vibe-coded projects or contributions made in a few hours, because it's shiny and it gives the impression of a productivity boost. Don't you dare asking how that is supposed to scale, if it's secure or even extensible, or you'll be the one killing the mood in the room. Even though that's precisely the hard part of the job.

Re: Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

#77

Post by wizzwizz4 »

fishtoaster wrote: post #69
gspr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We'll need to figure out the techniques and strategies that let us merge AI code sight unseen. Why do you assume that's doable? I'm not saying it's not, but it seems strange to just take for granted that it is.

Why do you assume I assume it's doable? :P For real, I'm not certain we will ever be able to merge AI code without human review. But: 1. Every time I've confidently though "AI will never be able to do X" in the last year, I've later been proven wrong, so I'm a bit wary to assume that again without strong reasons. 2. I see blog posts by some of the most AI-forward people that seems to imply some people are already man…

1. Every time I've confidently stated "this AI architecture will never be able to do X" in the past 6 years, I've not been proven wrong (with one possible exception earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47291893 – the jury's still out on that one). … No, my version doesn't really work, does it? It just sounds like bragging, or maybe hubris.

> some people are already managing large codebases without human review of raw code.

2. I have never believed this to be impossible. I do, however, maintain that these codebases are necessarily some combination of useless, plagiarism, and bloated. I have yet to see a case where there isn't a smaller, cheaper way to accomplish the same task faster and better.

> The returns on figuring this out are so incredibly high

3. And yet, they still haven't figured it out. My bias is that it isn't possible, because nothing has fundamentally changed about the model architectures since I first skimmed a PDF about GPT, and imagined an informal limiting proof that I still haven't found any holes in.

Re: Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

#78

Post by hamasho »

I've been spending much less time on reviews lately. I used to check if the code was correct and well-written, and worked on my local machine as expected and performed well. But I can't do it anymore. If they can vibe-code, why can't I vibe-review? Maybe something wrong will happen in production, but it's not my responsibility. I also stopped volunteering for on-call (well, I shouldn't in the first place). If I noticed someone reporting a bug in production during non-working hours, I investigated and implemented the solution, usually faster than coworkers. I thought it was my responsibility to contribute to the product if I could, even though it was beyond my job description. Working with AI-generated code really demoralized me and I can't love the product I'm working on anymore.

Re: Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

#79

Post by SPascareli13 »

My current stance with reviewing code is: It's not ok to make another human review the code you made with AI, if you used AI then you're the reviewer, so unless you come to me with a well defined question or decision to make, just merge it and take responsibility.

Obviously that could only work in a high trust environment, that why open source suffers so much with AI submissions.

Re: Verification debt: the hidden cost of AI-generated code

#80

Post by talkvoix »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #75
talkvoix wrote: post #68

With a CS degree and 15 years of software engineering under my belt, I was initially skeptical of 'vibe coding'. But the article is right about this adolescent phase. I recently built my platform ( https://voix.chat ) 100% through agentic workflows. Having that much experience meant I didn't use the AI as a crutch to learn how to code; I used it as a hyper-productive junior dev while I played the paranoid senior arch…

Your FAQ page is in Portuguese, even though my language is set to English. Changing the language does not seem to change the FAQ. Did you forget to localize this?

I just fixed that! Thank you so much for letting me know. I had forgotten to upload that commit, haha!

Could you refresh the page and test it?

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